Richard Holmes – Marlborough: Britain’s Greatest General (страница 20)

The Imminent Deadly Breach

Fortification and siegecraft had a grammar of their own, which John Churchill was now beginning to learn. The military historian David Chandler has observed that during the period 1680–1748 there were 167 sieges to 144 land engagements in Europe, and the Earl of Orrery affirmed in 1677: ‘We make war more like foxes than lions; and you have twenty sieges for one battle.’⁶⁴ The high walls of medieval castles had offered but a poor defence against gunpowder, and this period saw the apogee of the new artillery fortification, the speciality of military engineers like the Frenchman Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban and his Dutch rival Menno van Coehoorn. The bastion, an arrow-shaped work jutting out from the main curtain wall of a fortress, was the key to the system. The cannon mounted on it could fire, from its flanking ramparts, along the wall and, from the ramparts on its angled faces, could sweep the gently-sloping glacis on the other side of the broad ditch protecting the brick or ashlar scarp, the wall which shored up the squat, solid mass of bastion and curtain. A ‘covered way’ enabled men to walk in safety along the top of the counterscarp, the wall which propped up the far side of the ditch, and a palisade of sharpened stakes protected the covered way against an enemy who might have fought his way up the glacis.

Outworks, like the half-moon-shaped demi-lune or ravelin, could be used to keep the attacker out of reach of bastion and curtain, and the hornwork, sometimes called a crownwork because of its spiky plan, might cover an attractive approach or an exposed suburb. A variety of ingenuity was employed to make life unpleasant for the attacker. Caponiers, hutch-like works whose name came from the Spanish for chicken house, sat smugly in the ditch, ready to blast storming parties who hoped to cross it. Tenailles were banks of earth rising up out of the ditch just in front of the curtain to prevent the attacker’s artillery pounding the base of the wall. Ditches themselves might be wet, which made it hard for attackers to mine beneath them, but were prone to icing over in the winter and were smelly in the summer. Or they might be dry, in which case they were often provided with countermine galleries sneaking off below the glacis in the hope of allowing the defending engineers to interrupt the attackers’ attempts at mining.

Faced with this intractable low-lying geometry, the attacker, having first ensured that he had his slow-moving battering train of siege guns to hand, would encircle the fortress, digging ‘lines of circumvallation’ to keep off raiding parties from the outside. At an early stage he would summon the fortress to surrender, but a cool-headed governor would usually reject such impertinence. When the Dutch were besieging Maastricht in 1676 the governor, Count Calvo, entered into the spirit of the witty exchanges that were common at this stage in the siege. George Carleton, then serving as a gentleman volunteer in the Prince of Orange’s Foot Guards, tells us that:

The governor, by a messenger, intimating his sorrow that we had pawned our guns for ammunition bread [the siege train was late in arriving], answer was made that in a few days we hoped to give him a taste of the loaves which he should find would be sent him into the town in extraordinary plenty … I remembered another piece of raillery which passed some days after between the Rhinegrave and the same Calvo. The former sending him word that he hoped within three weeks to salute the governor’s mistress within the place, Calvo replied that he would give him leave to kiss her all over if he kissed her anywhere in three months.⁶⁵

The attacker formally began the siege by ‘breaking ground’ (tranchée ouverte), commencing his first line of trenches facing the part of the fortress he planned to assail. From this ‘first parallel’ zig-zag saps were pushed out, until a second parallel could be dug; more sapping would lead to a third. While the attacker’s engineers were busy grubbing their way forward, cannon would be mounted just forward of the parallels to bring fire to bear on the chosen front. A clear bell-like ring announced a direct hit on the exposed muzzle of a defending cannon, probably sending it spinning from its carriage, to the discomfiture of its detachment. Eventually, having first sent gusts of grapeshot scudding up the glacis to weaken the palisade, the attacker would try to storm the covered way.

This is where grenadiers came into their own. The hand grenade, its name deriving from the Spanish for pomegranate, which the little projectile resembled, was carried by specialist infantrymen who wore crownless caps rather than the more common tricorn hats, which made it easier for them to sling their muskets across their backs, leaving both hands free to light the fuse on their grenade before hurling it. The process required strength and courage, and by this time grenadiers, usually recruited on the basis of one company in each battalion, were the elite of the infantry. Although grenades could be used in a variety of circumstances, it was in the attack on the covered way that they were indispensable. The song ‘The British Grenadiers’ describes the process perfectly.

Whene’er we are commanded to storm the palisades

Our leaders march with fusees and we with hand grenades

We throw them from the glacis, about our enemies’ ears,

Sing tow row, row, row, row, the British Grenadiers.

A good deal could go amiss long before the victorious grenadiers fell to ‘drowning bumpers’ and tow-row-rowing. A Scots grenadier, Private Donald McBane, was about to hurl his grenade over the palisades at Maastricht when it exploded

in my hands, killing several about me, and blew me over the palisades; burnt my clothes so that the skin came off me. I … fell among Murray’s Company of Grenadiers, flayed like an old dead horse from head to foot. They cast me into the water to put out the fire about me.⁶⁶

George Carleton was part of a ‘forlorn hope’ (two sergeants and twenty grenadiers, a captain and fifty musketeers, and then a party carrying empty sandbags) sent to rush a breach in one of Maastricht’s bastions. They got into the work well enough, but then:

One of our own soldiers aiming to throw one [grenade] over the wall into the counterscarp among the enemy, it so happened that he unfortunately missed his aim, and the grenade fell down again on our side of the wall, very near the person who fired it. He, starting back to save himself, and some others who saw it fall doing the like, those who knew nothing of the matter fell into a sudden confusion … everybody was struck with a panic fear, and endeavoured to be the first who should quit the bastion … ⁶⁷

There was, though, a silver lining to this dark cloud: an ensign in Sir John Fenwick’s Regiment was killed in the scuffle, and Carleton received the vacancy.

Once the grenadiers had duly taken the covered way, the attacker would ‘crown’ the spot with gabions, great wicker baskets filled with earth, and would then haul up his heavy guns to thunder out across the ditch at the base of the scarp. His gunners would try to adjust their fire so as to make a cannelure – a long groove – cutting through the retaining masonry, and eventually gravity would assert itself and the whole mass of scarp and rampart would tumble down into the ditch. To be deemed practicable for assault the breach had to be wide enough for two men to walk up it side by side without using their hands. The great Vauban would often check practicability himself, creeping forward after dark and scrambling back like some great earthy badger, muttering, ‘C’est mûre, c’est bien mûre.’⁶⁸

The establishment of a practicable breach was usually the sign for the defender’s drummers to beat the chamade, requesting a parley, or for the attacker to formally warn the governor that, with a practicable breach in his wall and assault imminent, he should give in at once to avoid a needless effusion of blood. If a town was taken by storm the attacking troops could not be expected to respect either the possessions of the inhabitants or the virtue of their womenfolk, and a sensible governor would make what terms he could, although usually the longer he left the negotiation the worse the deal he could expect. The garrison of a fortress taken by storm could expect no mercy, a practice designed to discourage pointless last-ditch defence and reflecting the very real difficulty of controlling maddened troops who had just come boiling into the town through a defended breach.

Of course there were variations to this theme. A fortress might be taken by a coup de main, perhaps with a group of picked men in civilian clothes making their way covertly into the place and then suddenly opening a gate to admit troops hiding just outside. In 1702 the Bavarians took Ulm by this method, but a subsequent Austrian attempt against Maubeuge miscarried when a French sentry beat a particularly sullen ‘peasant’ in a line of carts awaiting entry, only for the man (in fact an infantry major) to lose his temper and grab a musket from under the hay on his cart, killing the sentry but alerting the garrison. While the siege was in progress each side would drop mortar bombs onto the other, and sometimes a lucky hit on a magazine would end the struggle at a stroke: in 1687 the Venetian siege of the Acropolis at Athens was decided by two mortar bombs which caused extensive damage to the Parthenon, then used by the Turks to store gunpowder. Sorties might set back the progress of the siege by wrecking trenches and carrying off or breaking engineers’ tools; mines could engulf whole bastions and discourage even the stoutest governor, or either side might run out of food or water.